Finding Hints of Gloom in Pithy Prose

Granted, there isn’t a whole lot to cheer about. The authority’s finances are shaky, and its workers are impatiently, and fruitlessly, waiting for pay raises that an arbitration panel says they deserve. Other public employees, after all, got theirs.

Still, might things be grimmer than is absolutely necessary? The question is prompted by the latest quotations posted in subway cars and buses as part of the authority’s Train of Thought program.

This is a successor to Poetry in Motion, which had a nice 15-year run but yielded to prose a year and a half ago. It was time for a change, said Alicia Martinez, the authority’s director of marketing and corporate communications. The goal, she said, is to have selections “that will stimulate thought and, hopefully, move people to reading more.”

The current choices are hardly smile inducers.

One is the first sentence of Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a giant insect.” The other comes from Schopenhauer: “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.” That’s from his “Studies in Pessimism.”

Those are some pick-me-ups — pessimism and Kafka’s huge bug, in a city where cockroaches rule.

“Actually, I’m reasonably happy,” Ms. Martinez said. Remember, the idea is to get people to think and to read. “My feeling has always been that if there ever was an opening line in literature that would get people interested in what came next, it would be the opening line of ‘The Metamorphosis,’ ” she said. “That’s why I selected it, and without adult supervision nobody stopped me.”

Call me a schlemiel, but Melville’s lead-in to “Moby Dick” always seemed more compelling. Ms. Martinez’s point is well taken, though. If a quotation gets the wheels turning in even a few brains, who can argue? And the program costs the authority nothing. Expenses like printing fees are covered by a game show whose gimmick is to provide an answer and have contestants supply the question. (What is “Jeopardy”?)

The adult supervision that Ms. Martinez mentioned used to be a few professors at Columbia University. Her program is in a metamorphosis of its own. She and Columbia parted ways a few months ago, so she has been flying solo of late. When the next batch of quotations appears in January — two for subway and bus posters, plus four more for the backs of millions of MetroCards — the choices will have been supplied by New York University and the New York Public Library.

JANE TYLUS, who runs the university’s Humanities Initiative and teaches Italian literature, is the chief quotation culler at N.Y.U. She “rattled a lot of cages” among colleagues, Professor Tylus said, and was herself “up till the wee hours of the morning thumbing through texts trying to find some good stuff.”

She came up with about 25 possibilities, of which three made the authority’s final cut. They were from John Muir, Nicholas Black Elk and Walt Whitman. The Whitman quotation, about the Civil War, resonates still for a nation in battle yet again. “Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background,” it begins. It continues, “The real war will never get in the books.”

At the library, the point person is Arezoo Moseni, a senior librarian, who said Ms. Martinez wanted material that was “off the beaten path” and “would knock people’s socks off.”

The hard part, both she and Ms. Martinez said, is finding selections that are thought-provoking but also pithy enough to fit on placards and can stand on their own, free of context. That is a tougher trick to pull off than one might think because, Ms. Martinez said, “most things do require context.”

Three of Ms. Moseni’s choices are scheduled to begin appearing in January — lines from E. W. Howe, the always dependable Oscar Wilde and Horace Greeley. No, not that old saw from Greeley about going west. This one holds that “the illusion that times that were are better than those that are has probably pervaded all ages.”

Which sounds like a somewhat cumbersome way of saying that nostalgia is not what used to be.

E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com

A version of this article appears in print on October 16, 2009, on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline: Finding Hints Of Gloom In Pithy Prose. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe